Thursday, April 9, 2009

In Barry's Cabal Of Liars And Cheats: Joe Biden (the Karl Rove dust-up)

"Pay every single hour, every single day that bombs were dropped in Afghanistan. How much longer does the bombing campaign continue?" Biden asked during an Oct. 22, 2001 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"We’re going to pay every single hour, every single day it continues." (Miles A. Pomper, “Building Anti-Terrorism Coalition Vaults Ahead Of Other Priorities,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly, 10/26/01)

"We've tried the military surge option before and it failed. If we try it again, it will fail again." --December 2006, after the announcement of president Bush's surge strategy.

"You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts franchise unless you have a slight Indian accent." --2006

"You don't know my state. My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country." --Response when Fox News' Chris Wallace suggested he couldn't draw votes in the South. As if being a slave state makes modern Southerners happy.

"[Obama is] the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." --Jan. 31, 2007, New York Observer.

And here's the latest bit of brain damage from this aneurysm victim:

Republican strategist Karl Rove called Vice President Biden a "liar" on Thursday, dramatically escalating a feud between Biden and aides to former President George W. Bush over Biden's claims to have rebuked Bush in private meetings.

"I hate to say this, but he's a serial exaggerator," Rove told FOX News. "If I was being unkind I would say liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop."

Rove added: "You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States."

Biden's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although Biden spokesman Jay Carney told Fox on Wednesday: "The vice president stands by his remarks."

Carney was referring to two controversial assertions by Biden, the latest coming Tuesday during an interview on CNN.

"I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office," Biden began, "'Well, Joe,' he said, 'I'm a leader.' And I said: 'Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is following.'"

The exchange is purely "fictional," said Rove, who was Bush's top political adviser in the White House.

"He ought to get out of it and get back to reality," Rove added. "He's making this up out of whole cloth."

Rove's skepticism was echoed by a variety of other Bush aides, including former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, chief of staff Andy Card and legislative liaison Candida Wolff.

They also disputed a similar assertion made by Biden in2004, when the former senator from Delaware told scores of Democratic colleagues at a lunch that he had challenged Bush's moral certitude about the Iraq war during a private meeting in the Oval Office. Two years later, Biden repeated his story about dressing down the president.

"When I speak to the president - and I have had plenty of opportunity to be with the president, at least prior to the last election, a lot of hours alone with him. I mean, meaning me and his staff," Biden said on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" in April2006. "And the president will say things to me, and I'll literally turn to the president, say: 'Mr. President, how can you say that, knowing you don't know the facts?' And he'll look at me and he'll say - my word - he'll look at me and he'll say: 'My instincts.' He said: 'I have good instincts.' I said: 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough.'"

"Joe Biden was never alone with the president for more than few moments," Rove said. "There was staff in the room the whole time."

Rove was equally appalled by Biden's claims of having given Bush his comeuppance.

"If you notice, all of these incidents have the same structure: Joe Biden courageously raises the impudent question; the president befuddles the answer; and Joe Biden drives home the dramatic response."

Rove scoffed at Biden's claims that "he and the president were sitting there in the Oval Office, he was tutoring the president, he was asking him the critical questions that no one was willing to confront him with."

"With all due respect to the vice president, these are the kind of things you can get away with if you are a United States Senator, ora backbencher in the U.S. House of Representatives," Rove said. "You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States."

Carney declined to specify the dates of his boss's purported Oval Office scoldings of Bush. Nor would he provide witnesses or notes to corroborate the episodes.

Throughout his career, Biden has often been accused of boasting about his accomplishments, embellishing his credentials and even stealing the words of others. He dropped out of the 1988 presidential race after being accused of plagiarizing British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

Last July, Biden came under fire for telling a questionable story about being "shot at" in Iraq. When questioned by the Hill newspaper, Biden backpedaled by saying: "I was near where a shot landed."

Biden went on to say that some sort of projectile "landed" outside a building in the Green Zone where he and another senator had spent the night during a visit in December 2005. The lawmakers were shaving in the morning when they felt the building shake, Biden said.

"No one got up and ran from the room-it wasn't that kind of thing," he told the Hill. "It's not like I had someone holding a gun to my head."

In September, Biden again raised eyebrows with another story about his exploits in war zones -- this time on "the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where my helicopter was forced down."

"If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me," Biden bragged to the National Guard Association. "Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are."

But it turns out that inclement weather, not terrorists, prompted the chopper to land in an open field during Biden's visit to Afghanistan in February 2008. Fighter jets kept watch overhead while a convoy of security vehicles was dispatched to retrieve Biden and fellow Sens. Chuck Hagel and John Kerry.

"We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn't have to," joked Kerry, a Democrat, to the AP. "Other than getting a little cold, it was fine."

FrontPage Magazine » FrontPage

Carl's Deal of the Day - Official TigerDirect.com RSS Feed

Newegg.com RSS Feed - Daily Deals

Official CompUSA.com Rss Feed

Blah, blah...

I'm a proud American more concerned with the truth than I am gaining friends.
I find that those who've never lived anywhere beyond where they were raised are more convinced about what others think and feel in life. It can be the poor uneducated wretch who can't stand those who don't look or sound like him, or the smug self-righteous fool who is convinced that Americans are racist xenophobes.
Generalities are easy for those who've never challenged themselves.
Just because you write a check to Greenpeace, the ACLU, or your favorite liberal cause doesn't excuse the way you sneer and hate on Christian fundamentalists who are trying to help others the best way they know.
How you made your money matters as much as how you ended up in jail. You're no more righteous for lying to clients and customers as you amassed your funds than the thief who robs you in the night.
I admire the person who makes a living from doing instead of selling. I've done both in life and I know the feeling you're left with at the end of the day. Just because you're a smooth talker and have mastered the art of sounding sincere doesn't impress me.